This is a truly unique film and Bertolucci successfully highlights the romance in an affair that is fundamentally destructive.
This project was created in professor Yake Smiths Directing Workshop class at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Nonetheless, when Brando is off-screen the film becomes hollow in comparison and is replaced by Jeanne's relationship with her fiance, an annoyingly pretentious TV director (Jean-Pierre Leaud). This is a scene recreation of the controversial film Last Tango in Paris. Unfortunately the obvious improvisation in the film prevents the character of Paul from staying within check as he gradually becomes too much like Marlon Brando in the second half of the film. In 'Last Tango in Paris' he gives everything and produces a performance of unrivalled force. Despite his overpowering talent, Marlon Brando has often shown poor judgement in his choice of projects and has frequently trudged through films with no apparent effort or interest. Paul's only other interest is in Marcel (Massimo Girotti), Rosa's lover, for whom he has a curious respect and maybe a desire to obtain through him a better understanding of his own wife.
He insists on a new form of relationship, so basic that even their names were kept secret from each other, where she submitted to his every desire, where he could punish himself and relieve his despair and anger towards his wife by punishing Jeanne. In meeting a 20 year old girl, Jeanne, played by Maria Schneider, in an empty apartment, Paul hopes to form a relationship purely on his own terms and at his own pace, i.e. Marlon Brando delivers a ferocious performance as Paul, a middle-aged American expatriate tormented by his wife, Rosa's recent suicide, her infidelities and his failure to understand their relationship. She has hard forced anal sex, lying on her stomach on the floor and then an older man climbs on top of her and good ass fucking her. Widely denounced as obscene upon its release and unjustifiably notorious for two of its scenes, Bernardo Bertolucci's 'Last Tango in Paris' is a savage story of lust and sexual debasement. Maria was a French actress, she became known sex symbol at the age of 19 in the sexually explicit and controversial Last Tango in Paris (1972), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.